 Hey coach, how's it going? My name is Coach Ben and I'm the founder here at Soccer Entrepreneur and today I wanted to answer a really important question that I've gotten from a lot of coaches and today's topic is how to start a soccer camp and how to make money with it. And so I'm going to show you my example of how I did this the right way and how I've done it the wrong way in the past. This way you can learn how to do this and now you can implement the strategies that I teach you into your own training program. So first thing I want to do is show you the wrong way that I did this in the very beginning and I want to break this down so it's very clear because this is a mistake that I know lots of trainers are making right now. So what I did at the beginning was I would want there to be maybe 10 to 20 players to come to a camp but I didn't have a way to let parents register for my camp or my clinic and the problem with that was I would have people come out to the facility or the location that I was training at and they would be paying me at the park or at the facility and that's not the right way to do this because if you're doing that you're not going to know who's signing up you're going to wait and have to get paid at the session and that's going to create a lot of confusion for you when you're trying to plan the session. It's a lot easier knowing who's going to be there how many players are there how many people have registered this way you can properly plan out the session that you have because if you just go to the park and you don't know how many people are going to be there there could be 50 people who come and you might not be prepared to do that. So instead of doing that like I said you want to have an online registration process to where parents are committing before they come to the camp this way they know on sorry you know on your end exactly how many people are coming how much money you've made and exactly how to prepare for the session and that was kind of the first thing that I know I really struggled with the beginning is I didn't have an online registration system that could handle that I used to try to do everything manually by myself where I would collect money from parents. The second thing that I would do that I used to never do at the beginning was I never called people or emailed parents before I had these camps. The second problem that I faced was my communication with parents and this is where I know I really went wrong at the beginning when I was trying to get my message out there with my marketing about when I had my camps you know how many players could come who I wanted to be there my message with the parents was not strong and it wasn't clear and instead of not really being sure with parents about when things are where things are how many people are involved you need to set up like I said at the beginning a registration page but you need to be very clear with who you want to come and I think it's important to take the extra step to even get on the phone with parents this way you are attracting the right people there and when you're on the phone with parents you can get them to spread the message about your clinic or camp to other parents that they know and I know that was a big problem for me at the beginning because I was very shy I didn't feel that confident talking to parents over the phone but once I learned how to communicate better with parents my communication with parents became so much better to where they would want to tell other parents about the camps that I was doing and this helped me so much with my marketing because then I could just call one or two people and they would spread the word for me without me having to do any of the extra work so the communication needs to be key with what you're packaging together for your clinic who you want there or who you want to be at the clinic what types of players the age group the gender the skill level I mean you can make this as specific as you want but the communication with the parents has to be at a high level to where they know exactly what you want this way they can go spread the word for you the last problem that I know I had starting off that other trainers have been asking about is what to do at the clinic like what type of drills or how long it should be I know in the past I would use some clinics for like three hours and the problem with that is if you have a small amount of players and say you have 10 to 20 players there if you can't keep all of the players fully engaged for the session the players are going to get bored so if you don't come prepared to those types of sessions and you don't have enough drills or content to give the players then they're going to lose interest and that's the last thing you want to do so when you structure your clinics you have to package together everything in a short amount of time and the way I like to do all of my camps or clinics now is everything is for only one hour it I might at the longest I might have something for two hours but if we do that we're going to make sure that we spend probably 20-30 minutes just scrimmaging or playing against each other using all the skills or the techniques that we worked on the very beginning of the session and doing that at the end but I don't like players to be just standing around I don't want them to have that experience because I know that's what they're getting at other camps or other clinics and the whole point of you creating something that is going to attract players to come back you have to have something that's different it can't be the same thing that other people offer because you probably have seen it before there's lots of other camps or clinics out there that are purely made for there to be lots of kids there and a lot of kids who go to that they're not really getting the hands-on personal attention that you could be offering so when you are going to set up your camps this is something that you want to do like I said you want to have an online registration form this way you know exactly who's coming I would have a detailed process where you are calling or emailing the parents before they get there so you know what the kids need help with and that's also a great marketing tool to help the parents spread the word about what you're doing and lastly you need to be very structured with what you're offering in the actual clinic this way when you get there it looks very professional you know exactly what you're doing everything is timed out and you're not there putting on a clinic for kids who are being bored or they're there for way too long everybody should be involved the entire time all the players should be totally engaged with what you're doing this is why I like to recommend doing clinics for like maybe an hour at two hours at the most so that's it for today guys if you have any questions about what I just talked about with the clinics and maybe you want to learn more about it just shoot me a comment below definitely subscribe to my channel we have a lot of videos that are soccer related so if you're looking to build a business that's what this whole channel is about and if you want to start a soccer academy the same way I did eight years ago I created a great resource for you it's called the startup soccer academy book and there's going to be a link below this video you can go check that out there you'll see a free preview of the book there's 10 chapters and you basically just go through a checklist of what to do legally how to get everything set up this way you know you can start your soccer academy with confidence and this is something that you can do full-time and that's why that's what I teach coaches to do that are part of my mastermind you can learn more about that as well in the description so that's it for today guys thanks again for watching and I'll talk to you soon